It’s June 2015, and ListUp was just an idea in inception, nothing more than a thought at the back of my mind. Fast forward today, we’re a team of 20-odd people working hard to make ListUp India’s biggest P2P social buying & selling community.

Looking back at the events leading up to today, I can now connect the dots and see how everything that happened could not have had a more fitting climax than us starting ListUp.

4th June, 2015: Quite abruptly, I stood up at my desk and told my boss that I want to leave Sony and go back to India to work on something I have had in mind for years. The same day TVF launched it’s flagship series “TVF Pitchers: Tu beer hai” and that episode was the first thing I saw after returning from office.

Coincidence, or a beautiful hand played by destiny ?

I found myself connecting with the theme of the episode in a very intimate manner, and couldn’t be happier and more proud of what I saw as being a very bold decision.

Meanwhile, Pulkit Gupta (IIT Bombay alumnus, and a very close friend of mine) was also keen to return back to India and do something challenging to work on. Pulkit and I had always been keen to start a venture together but we were struggling to figure out what problem we’d truly love solving, something that we’ve experienced personally, something that’s very close to our heart. A month later, Pulkit also resigned and moved back to India, and we were all-set to start this new exciting journey.

There were two major incidents that shaped on to creating was ListUp is today:

First incident: When I joined Sony, It took me more than a month to settle up in Japan (Sony provided us an empty 1DK apartment in Tokyo and we had to set it up by ourselves). Most of my joining bonus went into buying those new items, and soon enough, when I was returning to India, it was time to sell all of them (shipping it back to India is expensive and troublesome).

I explored all possible means of selling that stuff online: classifieds websites, craigslist, GaijinPot, Facebook Groups and even tried visiting second hand shops. It was a herculean effort but I was finally able to sell most of it. In adversity lies the opportunity for immense learning and during this exercise, I also learned about startups working in this domain. One such interesting startup was Mercari: currently Japan’s biggest C2C marketplace app (Mercari recently became Japan’s first startup unicorn)

Second incident: I returned back to India, and as expected, started flat hunting to find myself a roof. After multiple visits, I ended up liking an unfurnished flat in now well-known Powai Valley, paid half month token amount to the broker and started looking to buy used stuff again to furnish my home (buying used ones would be cheaper and could help me save for the startup also).

Buying used stuff! That was one frustrating experience! I used to spend days and nights on classifieds sites, FB groups whenever I used to get some spare time. Few days later I realized it’s not worth all this hassle. I was so frustrated that I had to give up that unfurnished flat (including the token amount) and ended up taking a furnished flat instead.

The series of events that happened over these 1–2 months gave me several interesting insights and an insider’s eye into what was missing and what could be done to improve the second-hand buying experience in India based on my learnings in Japan.

It was now August 2015 : Pulkit and I were in constant discussion on how we can try solving this problem, as we knew buying & selling is still a huge unsolved problem in India and no one has attempted to redesign the way in which buyers and sellers connect with each other, for several years now.

Over the course of regularly meeting my friends, I figured out that most of the stuff that I was hunting for, was in fact somewhere around me lying idle with my friends. They no longer had use for it and would have loved to sell it to me, if only they knew I wanted it right then.(reminds me of the famous hindi proverb: “bagal me chora, shahar me dindhora”)

We also realized that there is still a lot of room to improve the second hand buying experience by incorporating our learnings from our previous personal experiences and our journey so far. By this time — we had got 2 big takeaways that we believe needs to be focused on in order to solve this problem effectively and efficiently:

• Local: Why go far distances when you can discover something locally ?Also the hypothesis that the probability of finding stuff that is useful for you near your own locality rather than a place further way, we just needed to solve for discovery.
• Social: People love dealing with communities (e.g. Flat & Flatmates group, FB status, Notice boards etc.). People prefer to deal with people in their circle, someone they could trust. The real problem lies in connecting them, connecting the right buyers and sellers.

By this time, we had decided to work on ListUp as we had got a pretty good idea about this industry (personal experience both in Japan & India). We believed that our unique approach to solve this problem using the recipe that combines local and social elements to the buying and selling process, made it game-changing and revolutionary.

By comparison, the existing platforms seemed more like a plain directory of listings arranged in the order of timestamp which did not leverage upon mobile technology in connecting the right buyers and sellers with each other. Someone had to do it!

We just needed these 3 things before we wanted to take this plunge: know the real problem better than anyone else, know the customers really well, and the deep burning desire to succeed. and now, fortunately enough, we had ’em all.

And that’s how the game began, we started working all-out on the app with acquaintances from IIT Bombay and with help from freelancers. The basic version of our app was ready. Now, we needed a technical co-founder who aligned with our vision and could be part of this exciting journey.

And that’s how the game began, we started working all-out on the app with acquaintances from IIT Bombay and with help from freelancers. The basic version of our app was ready. Now, we needed a technical co-founder who aligned with our vision and could be part of this exciting journey.

Today, we’re proud to see people actively using ListUp in reality. ListUp app already has 5000+ users and 1000+ verified listings in less than a month with an increasing number of downloads every single day. We place extreme importance to tech in the product (more than 60% of our team is working on the product & tech). The product is still not perfect (And we would like to believe, we will always keep tinkering with it until we achieve a state of ‘perfection’), there’s still lot more to be added in coming few months that will give users real value that no other platform can provide.

We’ve always believed in creating the best product with the best consumer experience. For us, the concept is extremely interesting, promising and most importantly, all 3 of us are very attached to this problem statement which I believe is the biggest motivation for any startup founder i.e.

We’ve always believed in creating the best product with the best consumer experience. For us, the concept is extremely interesting, promising and most importantly, all 3 of us are very attached to this problem statement which I believe is the biggest motivation for any startup founder i.e.

Our focus was to create a game-changing product that could disrupt the classifieds industry and how people trade things locally. Fortunately, we never had to run for money as people could see the real value in ListUp and the fact that it can change things in a big and meaningful manner.

It was a great validation of our mission and vision that we’ve had investors’ interest even before we launched, and closed our seed funding round with a set of investors. We continue to get inbound interest from VCs and there is much to look forward to in the near future.

Click here to check out ListUp Android app on Google Play.